Chart ‘o the decade
by digby
It just doesn’t get any more stark than this:
I’ll just note one little thing and then move along. The 1981, 1990 and 2001 recession recoveries all happened under Republican presidents. And Democratic congresses …
More depressing charts, here. Have a drink first.
It’s annual holiday fundraiser time …
Duck kerfuffle
by digby
Oh boy. Howie has the latest on the Duck Dynasty flap:
Do you know what a fluffer is? The clinical Wikipedia definition: “A fluffer is a person employed to keep a male adult film star aroused on the set. These duties, which do not necessarily involve touching the actors, are considered part of the makeup department. After setting up the desired angle, the director asks the actors to hold position and calls for the fluffer to ‘fluff’ the actors for the shot. Fluffing could also entail sexual acts such as fellatio or non-penetrative sex.” …
Fluffer is also the name of a 2001 gay porn film that got a buzz because Blondie (Debbie Harry) was in it. But it will have a whole new life now because so was Scott Gurney, the creator of Duck Dynasty.
Howie’s got clips at the link. They’re actually quite tasteful, all things considered. Mr Gurney played one of the leads by the name of Johnny Rebel. He’s quite attractive.
The plot of this gay porn saga, according to Wikipedia:
Sean McGinnis is a film student who moves to Los Angeles to break into the movie business. While looking for work, he passes the time watching rented videos. He sets out to watch Citizen Kane, but the videotape has accidentally been switched with an adult movie called Citizen Cum. Sean becomes instantly obsessed with the star of Citizen Cum, Johnny Rebel. His interest in Johnny leads Sean to turn down work in the mainstream film industry to become a cameraman for Men of Janus, the production company that has Johnny under exclusive contract. On his first shoot, Sean ends up as a “Fluffer” for Johnny, performing (offscreen) oral sex on him to help him maintain an erection and reach orgasm for the “money shot.” He learns that Johnny’s real name is Mikey, he is “gay-for-pay” and doesn’t perform oral sex on other men or even kiss. Johnny has Sean fluff him on additional productions, and Sean’s infatuation continues to grow…
I don’t have anything to add.
But I can’t wait to hear what Sarah Palin has to say about it.
It’s going to be difficult for her to beat this lovely comment from her book about Holy Christmas:
“Last year, however, I think I was able to pull off a good one for him. To combat the anti-gun chatter coming from Washington, I surprised him with a nice, needed, powerful gun. I then asked him for a metal gun holder for my four-wheeler. Not only was this small act of civil disobedience fun, it allowed me to finally live out one of my favorite lines from a country song: “He’s got the rifle, I got the rack.”
The 2013 I missed
by digby
This is how people who don’t care about politics see the world:
I am not putting them down for this. It’s perfectly understandable that people have other interests, particularly when politics are as uninspiring as they are right now. And Mandela is at the top, so that says something. But notice that politics does come through elsewhere in the form of entertainment — which is the main reason the right wing hates Hollywood so much. (Not that they should. Gun culture has a lot to be grateful to Hollywood for.)
I confess that I’m clueless about some of the stuff mentioned there, so even media junkies like me are in our own silos, seeing the world from my own chosen perspective. When I was a kid it was very different. Mass media was a few magazines, the local newspaper and three TV networks. We were all reading and watching the same thing whether we liked it or not. I guess that at least partially explains the huge pushback against conformity by the baby boom during the 60s. It really was boring …
It’s annual holiday fundraiser time …
An important little primer
by digby
… on why everyone should STFU about the latest iteration of the yellow peril — the Chinese boogeyman buying up all our bonds and , I don’t know, taking all your children as white slaves. Or something. Jesse Meyerson explains why this fearmongering is dumb as a bag of rocks:
But more to the point, it does not matter who owns the public debt, because its repayment places absolutely no budgetary burden on anyone. It might take a minute or two out of the day of some operations person at the Fed, but that’s all. That person might bring up the spreadsheet of a Chinese bank’s savings account at the Fed (its “Treasury securities” account) and deduct a certain amount, by a keystroke, thereupon to bring up that same bank’s checking (“reserve”) account spreadsheet and add that same amount, by a second keystroke. The debt is thereby paid. Ta-da!
No one sees a tax increase. No one’s stuff is dispossessed by Chinese soldiers. No Shanghai Shylock turns up demanding pounds of American flesh. There definitely isn’t slavery. As a matter of fact, no one except people working in finance is ever aware that it is happening.
It’s intuitive but wrong to picture the public debt as private debt we’re all on the hook for. In reality, public debt isn’t really properly thought of as borrowing at all, according to Frank N. Newman, former deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President Clinton. Since the U.S. doesn’t need to borrow back the dollars it originally spent into existence in order to spend them again, the purpose of issuing Treasuries is really just for “providing an opportunity for investors to move funds from risky banks to safe and liquid treasuries,” he writes. Investors aren’t doing the U.S. a favor by buying treasury securities; the U.S. is doing investors a favor by selling them. Otherwise, without the option “to place their funds in the safest most liquid form of instrument there is for U.S. dollars,” would-be bondholders “are stuck keeping some of their funds in banks, with bank risk.”
The reason China owns all those safe securities is that because the U.S. purchases all those Chinese-made commodities for U.S. dollars. China converts the dollars into the dollars’ interest-bearing siblings, bonds, and park them at the Fed until they mature – that is, when the spreadsheet switcheroo ceremoniously retires the debt. At this point, China usually just rolls over the debt by purchasing new securities. This keeps Chinese currency weak against the dollar, so China can have the U.S.’s export market – this is the “currency manipulation” you’ve heard self-righteous pontification about.
What does the U.S. get out of this arrangement? IPhones for which it exchanges digital entries in a spreadsheet at the Fed. What does China get? An extremely productive economy, for one thing.
Unfortunately leaders of both parties, including Clinton and Obama, have made it sound as if the government is like your household budget and the Chinese government is HSBC holding the note on your way of life. As you can see, that’s utter nonsense.
We’re never going to be able to deal with the realities of the modern global economy and its implications for the average person unless our leaders stop pushing nonsense like this. It’s this kind of pseudo-Straussian elitism that’s gotten us in the mess we’re in today.
It’s holiday fundraiser time …
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Dispatch from Taser Nation —- featuring a whole bunch of people in pain
by digby
Annual fundraiser:
I guess that’s the 21st century version of stepping on a banana peel to some people — except it includes lots of horrible screaming in pain, which evidently makes it all the funnier. The fact that people get concussions from their falls, sometimes lose their teeth or break bones — and sometimes die — is a small price to pay for such hilarity.
I don’t happen to be a person who thinks that writhing in pain is particularly funny in any circumstance. But I’m really appalled to see policeman using it to force a citizen into compliance. It is not, as advertised, simply a useful tool to replace more lethal force. It’s much more commonly used in situations where no lethal force would ever be required. The abuses of this weapon have been documented on Youtube and in newspaper accounts all over the world. It is, quite simply, legal torture.
And we laugh about it. It’s a big joke.
I have been documenting these abuses and discussing this legal torture weapon for years on this blog. I’m still shocked (pardon the pun) that this has become such an accepted method of social control in a free society. In my own small way, I hope I’ve managed to raise people’s consciousness a little bit about this issue. In essence, I think it is one of the primary measures by which we can judge our culture’s ongoing defining of deviancy down. (It ain’t about sex, folks…) When police can routinely shoot children and bedridden 90 year old women full of electricity without any serious fear of official sanction or the public at large rising up in opposition I fear that any society has crossed an important line.
I think this is an important issue and I will continue to write about it — and on the occasions that I’m called upon to speak in public it’s a topic I always try to raise. There is a growing awareness of the dangers of these weapons, which is all to the good. Nobody knows in advance which people might die and neither do the people on whom they deploy it. The rising death toll is making the justice system take a harder look at this tactic.
But it’s also important to discuss this in the context of our civil liberties. Tasers allow the government to inflict pain on average citizens at will to make them comply with its orders. They are not used simply to replace the use of lethal force or even instances where an officer might have used a baton in the past. It is used to make it more efficient and convenient for the government to control its citizens in ways that would have required talking, psychology and simple persuasion in the past. And much like the NSA programs, we have forgotten to ask ourselves if this convenient technology comports with the values we’ve always espoused as a society that requires due process of law before the government can use its immense powers against its own citizens. Shooting 50,000 volts into elderly grandmothers or epileptics in the midst of a seizure, small children or simply an average person who annoys a police officer with “attitude” does not comport with those values in my opinion.
I’d like to keep writing about this subject, raising consciousness and generally just documenting the abuses so they are out there for people to see on a regular basis. If you find this an area of concern as well, I could use your support to keep this blog going and reaching whomever I can with this message. If you have a couple of bucks to spare, I’d be very grateful:
Tools to destroy your wingnut uncle’s climate denialism this holiday
by David Atkins
Salon has a really tremendous article on climate change by John Rennie of Scientific American, listing seven ways to shut down a climate change denier. It’s far too rich and dense to justice with excerpts, but I’ll just post the first two of his seven points here. Be sure to head over to the full article to read the rest:
Claim 1: Anthropogenic CO2 can’t be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources.Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant.
Although CO2 makes up only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, that small number says nothing about its significance in climate dynamics. Even at that low concentration, CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and acts as a greenhouse gas, as physicist John Tyndall demonstrated in 1859. The chemist Svante Arrhenius went further in 1896 by estimating the impact of CO2 on the climate; after painstaking hand calculations he concluded that doubling its concentration might cause almost 6 degrees Celsius of warming—an answer not much out of line with recent, far more rigorous computations.
Contrary to the contrarians, human activity is by far the largest contributor to the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, anthropogenic CO2 amounts to about 30 billion tons annually—more than 130 times as much as volcanoes produce. True, 95 percent of the releases of CO2 to the atmosphere are natural, but natural processes such as plant growth and absorption into the oceans pull the gas back out of the atmosphere and almost precisely offset them, leaving the human additions as a net surplus. Moreover, several sets of experimental measurements, including analyses of the shifting ratio of carbon isotopes in the air, further confirm that fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are the primary reasons that CO2 levels have risen 35 percent since 1832, from 284 parts per million (ppm) to 388 ppm—a remarkable jump to the highest levels seen in millions of years.
Contrarians frequently object that water vapor, not CO2, is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas; they insist that climate scientists routinely leave it out of their models. The latter is simply untrue: from Arrhenius on, climatologists have incorporated water vapor into their models. In fact, water vapor is why rising CO2 has such a big effect on climate. CO2 absorbs some wavelengths of infrared that water does not so it independently adds heat to the atmosphere. As the temperature rises, more water vapor enters the atmosphere and multiplies CO2′s greenhouse effect; the IPCC notes that water vapor (pdf) may “approximately double the increase in the greenhouse effect due to the added CO2 alone.”
Nevertheless, within this dynamic, the CO2 remains the main driver (what climatologists call a “forcing”) of the greenhouse effect. As NASA climatologistGavin Schmidt has explained, water vapor enters and leaves the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2, and tends to preserve a fairly constant level of relative humidity, which caps off its greenhouse effect. Climatologists therefore categorize water vapor as a feedback rather than a forcing factor. (Contrarians who don’t see water vapor in climate models are looking for it in the wrong place.)
Because of CO2′s inescapable greenhouse effect, contrarians holding out for a natural explanation for current global warming need to explain why, in their scenarios, CO2 is not compounding the problem.
Claim 2: The alleged “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,600 years has been disproved. It doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of a “medieval warm period” around 1000 A.D. that was hotter than today is. Therefore, global warming is a myth.
It is hard to know which is greater: contrarians’ overstatement of the flaws in thehistorical temperature reconstruction from 1998 by Michael E. Mann and his colleagues, or the ultimate insignificance of their argument to the case for climate change.
First, there is not simply one hockey-stick reconstruction of historical temperatures using one set of proxy data. Similar evidence for sharply increasing temperaturesover the past couple of centuries has turned up independently while looking at ice cores, tree rings and other proxies for direct measurements, from many locations. Notwithstanding their differences, they corroborate that Earth has been getting sharply warmer.
A 2006 National Research Council review of the evidence concluded “with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries”—which is the section of the graph most relevant to current climate trends. The report placed less faith in the reconstructions back to 900 A.D., although it still viewed them as “plausible.” Medieval warm periods in Europe and Asia with temperatures comparable to those seen in the 20th century were therefore similarly plausible but might have been local phenomena: the report noted “the magnitude and geographic extent of the warmth are uncertain.” And a new research paper by Mann and his colleagues seems to confirm that the Medieval Warm Period and the “Little Ice Age” between 1400 and 1700 were both caused by shifts in solar radiance and other natural factors that do not seem to be happening today.
After the NRC review was released, another analysis by four statisticians, called theWegman report, which was not formally peer reviewed, was more critical of the hockey stick paper. But correction of the errors it pointed out did not substantially change the shape of the hockey stick graph. In 2008 Mann and his colleagues issued an updated version of the temperature reconstruction that echoed their earlier findings.
But hypothetically, even if the hockey stick was busted… What of it? The case for anthropogenic global warming originally came from studies of climate mechanics, not from reconstructions of past temperatures seeking a cause. Warnings about current warming trends came out years before Mann’s hockey stick graph. Even if the world were incontrovertibly warmer 1,000 years ago, it would not change the fact that the recent rapid rise in CO2 explains the current episode of warming more credibly than any natural factor does—and that no natural factor seems poised to offset further warming in the years ahead.
The original also contains a bevy of quotes too numerous to reproduce individually here. It’s a great refresher for the holidays when your wingnut uncle tells the family that there’s no climate change.
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The battle of Gilead featuring Sarah Silverman, Lizz Winstead, Lesley Gore and Margaret Atwood.
by digby
Annual fundraiser:
That was the first pop song I ever learned the words to. I wonder why?
You cannot underestimate just how radical that song was for its time. It is even more radical when you know that Lesley Gore is gay … It was a cris de coeur of the era (even if the teen girls who loved it had no idea) a simple notion that should be laughable today and yet, sadly, is not.
It was the theme song of the recent NY telethon to support women’s reproductive rights in Texas.
In case anyone who reads this blog doesn’t already know it, there are lots of issues that get my blood up. But there is nothing, nothing, that offends my fundamental belief in human rights and simple justice than the idea that the state has a right to force women to bear children against their will. As my friend DebCoop said so pointedly:
For women ALL Roads to freedom and equality – economic equality and most particularly the ability to avoid poverty START with control of their bodies. If they can’t control how they get pregnant and when they will have a child then poverty is the result.
There is theory about something called the Prime Mover – the first action or the first cause. Well for women it IS reproductive rights. It precedes everything. It really is simple. Without the abilty to control your own body then you are a slave to everything else.
I read The Handmaid’s Tale when it came out and it completely changed me. I know that sounds hyperbolic but it’s true. I had always had a political bent and was an instinctive civil libertarian. And I’d read all the usual feminist literature of the time and thought I understood the fight for women’s rights. But Handmaid’s Tale was different. It illustrated the stakes for me in ways I had not previously understood.
“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
Back when I wrote pseudonymously, I worked hard at writing without resorting to authority or personal experience. The greatest challenge was writing about abortion rights. But it was a great exercise in argumentation and gave me a full grounding in why I believed what I believed. And the research I did in writing my posts introduced me to people I never would have known about otherwise. I learned about the “purity balls” in Colorado and the “Sodomized Virgin Exception” in South Dakota. I realized that the anti-abortion zealots were wily and cunning and were very committed to the long haul. This intense rollback of women’s reproductive rights on the state level was just beginning. And it’s gaining steam.
Yes, we’ve recently been able to draw attention to the issue when it became a hot partisan topic. And there are good reasons to believe that women’s concerns will remain a matter of interest in electoral campaigns, at least as long as the right continues to run neanderthals for office. But don’t ever forget that whenever there is an issue to be “dealt away” in a negotiation (for the good of the “deal”) it’s the women who are inevitably called upon to sacrifice. After all, that is our traditional role. Mommy eats last.
I’d like to keep writing about this, hammering home the importance of it, pointing out the conservative strategies for undermining human rights and keeping the faith with the many, many men and women who are fighting on the front lines for justice and equality for women everywhere. But I need your support to do it.
If you can spare a couple of bucks for an independent feminist blogger who promises to call it like it is no matter which party or which politician is saying it, I’d be very grateful.
When does the government consider a leaker a patriot? (When he or she is a VIP)
by digby
Apparently, the hunt for the leakers of classified information only concerns itself with the little people. Top level leakers have nothing to worry about. It’s not surprising, I suppose, but you’d think the harsh critics of whistleblowers would at least be a little bit chagrined by their obvious hypocrisy as they rail on about the sanctity of their oaths and the threat to national security by violating them:
The handling of the disclosures of protected information to the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the award-winning account of the U.S. hunt for bin Laden, points up an apparent double standard in President Barack Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on unauthorized leaks.
Disclosures by lower-level officials have been vigorously pursued. For example, seven Navy SEALs were reprimanded for disclosing classified material to the makers of a military video game. Moreover, the administration has prosecuted a record number of intelligence community personnel for leaking.
Rarely, however, has the administration taken criminal action against senior officials for leaking.
A central pillar of the crackdown – labeled the Insider Threat Program by the administration – aims to use behavioral profiling and tips from co-workers to identify federal employees who someday might make unauthorized disclosures.
Under the program, the Defense Department equates leaking to the news media with spying. Many of those who’ve been targeted, however, contend that they’re compelled to leak about official malfeasance because the government’s whistle-blower protection system doesn’t work, a defense raised by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
You remember the Insider Threat Program, right? It should make you feel very safe:
This is a public document by the way. And yes it seriously says, “it is better to have reported overzealously than never to have reported at all.”
Here’s the FBI’s version. Found it through a simple google search:
No those aren’t parodies or the paranoid imaginings of some sci-fi writer.
If you read the original McClatchy story, you’ll see that each federal department — even the Peace Corps, has implemented this program.
The good news is that if you happen to get caught leaking classified information to a Hollywood producer who promises to make the government torture program look as if it led to evidence of Osama bin laden’s whereabouts, it’s all good. As we’ve seen with every Bob Woodward book written since the mid-1980s, you can leak all the classified information you want as long as the story you lead your stenographers to tell is one that makes all government decisions look brave and necessary. Criticism, on the other hand, is dangerous to our liberties.
Read the McClatchy story for a full rundown on the Zero Dark Thirty leaks. At least one very important person got off scott free.
Losing the family jewels over Duck Dynasty
by digby
The Duck defenders are really on a roll. Get a load of this one from the “culture” critic at PJ media:
Robertson gave an interview to GQ in which, in his inimitable rough-spoken way, he grouped homosexual activity with the other sins — while also pointing out, as has been under-reported, that we must all repent and love one another going forward. For this, A&E knocked him off what is one of the most popular cable shows ever. They should be boycotted for this. It is, as openly lesbian intellectual Camille Paglia put it succinctly, “punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist.” Other decent gays have concurred, God bless them.
But the rest of you liberals… listen, I know you. I know a lot of you are against the kind of oppressive and bigoted activity that is becoming more and more emblematic of leftist thought and action. But there comes a point where if you’re not against them, you’re for them.
Take a look in the mirror, liberals. Are you beginning to see Pajama Boy in there? Take it as a warning. Side with the left long enough, and your genitals fall off. As well they should.
No word about whether it was cool to drop those Dixie Chicks. But then they don’t have the kind of genitals that fall off so who gives a damn, amirite? Or what about this little brouhaha, which had the big swinging wingnuts clutching their pearls like a bunch of schoolmarms:
ABC Sports apologized Tuesday for an “inappropriate” opening of the Philadelphia Eagles-Dallas Cowboys Monday Night Football telecast involving a sexually suggestive locker room meeting between Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens and ABC’s Desperate Housewives’ star Nicollette Sheridan.
Sheridan, playing her character from the show, wore only a towel as she tried to seduce Owens in the team locker room. Initially unable to entice him to skip the game for her, she dropped her towel. Owens then said, “Aw, hell, the team’s going to have to win without me,” and she jumped into his arms.
“We have heard from many of our viewers about last night’s MNF opening segment, and we agree that the placement was inappropriate,” ABC Sports Vice President Mark Mandel said in a statement. “We apologize.”
As I was thinking about this “utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist” move by corporate person A&E, and all the talk about censorship and the First Amendment and something ELSE kept tickling the back of mind. Oh, right. This:
KWAME HOLMAN: Since it opened at New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art last week, “Sensation” indeed has caused one, and drawn crowds from curators and critics to simply the curious.
Fully titled, “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” and carrying a mock health warning, the show features 90 works from the collection of British advertising magnate Charles Saatchi.
Among them: Damien Hirst’s “A Thousand Years” composed of flies, maggots, a cow’s head, sugar, and water, another Hirst work, “This Little Piggy went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed Home” a split pig carcass floating in formaldehyde; Marc Quinn’s, “Self,” a bust of the artist made from nine pints of his frozen blood; and, most controversial, artist Chris Ofili’s work titled “The Holy Virgin Mary;” it is this work — a depiction of a black Madonna adorned with elephant dung and sexually-explicit photos — that was deemed by New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani “anti-Catholic.”
The city acted to revoke the museum’s lease and remove its municipal funding unless it took down the show.
MAYOR RUDOLPH GIULIANI: If I ignored it, then the argument would be on the other side: How can you ignore something as disgusting, horrible and awful as this? And my view is you do what you think is right. I believe opposing this is the right thing.
And the difference, of course, is that Giuliani represented the government, the entity to which the First Amendment actually applies.
Genitals falling off notwithstanding, let’s just say that liberals aren’t the ones who’ve cornered the market on moral outrage.
h/t to AS
It’s annual holiday fundraising time …
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Ole Bucky’ll be back before you can say “Blast Off”
by digby
I’ll bet you thought that scene was satire didn’t you? Well think again. CNN reports on one of those fully trustworthy members of the National Security c0.3omplex in whom we Americans are supposed to have so much confidence:
A U.S. general who oversaw nuclear weapons boozed, fraternized with “hot women” and disrespected his hosts during an official visit to Russia this year, an investigative report shows.
Maj. Gen. Michael Carey led the 20th Air Force responsible for three nuclear wings.
He was relieved of duty in October because of loss of confidence in his leadership, the Air Force said at the time without providing specific details.But an Air Force Inspector General report released Thursday sheds more light into the case.
It details the events of a July trip to Moscow in which witnesses recalled Carey drinking too much.
During a layover in Switzerland, the report states, he bragged loudly about his position as commander of a nuclear force, saying he “saves the world from war every day.”
And the shenanigans continued in Moscow, according to the report.
While there, Carey and an unidentified man walked to a nearby hotel to meet “two foreign national women.” He returned to his Marriott hotel room in the wee hours of the morning.
As a result, Carey was 45 minutes late in joining a delegation to the Moscow suburb of Sergiyev Posad, according to the report. He attributed the tardiness to jet lag, and said his body clock was out of whack.
During a lunch banquet later, he downed more alcohol and talked about Syria and Edward Snowden, according to the report.
His Russian hosts did not seem amused by his comments, according to the report.
Russia granted Snowden, a former NSA contractor who released intelligence secrets, temporary asylum this year. Russia is also a major ally of Syria.
In addition, Carey announced he’d “met two hot women the night before,” and continually interrupted a monastery guide during a tour, the report says, his speech slurred the entire time.
“At one point, he tried to give her (the guide) a fist bump,” the report says, citing a witness. “She had no idea what he was trying to do. It was again, very, very embarrassing.”
Yeah. But what’s the big deal about a nuclear accident, really? I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. 20, 30 million tops …
The good news is that this fellow has suffered no career repercussions. He’s one of the “good guys” you see.
Update: Oh, this is interesting. The tentacles of the national security state go everywhere …evunthelibrul TNR.
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